Santos fell backward against the tree, dropping his chainsaw. A gaping wound had appeared in his side, blood pouring from it. "I'm in shock," Santos thought as a paralysing numbness filled the rest of his body. He watched, a distant observer, as the rest of loggers dropped around him; unseen assailants attacking from the forest around them with arrows, spears and gunfire. Then the forest was quiet again.

The attackers emerged from their hiding places. Santos was sure he recognised them as being from one of the local tribes. At their head, giving them instructions, was a young man who was dressed in a strange combination of western clothes and native finery. He beckoned to the others and as a group they began to go through the ambush site, checking the bodies of the fallen. One of the attackers stopped at Santos and looked down at him with grey eyes. Santos raised an arm and tried to speak - to ask for help - but only a bubbling noise emerged from his mouth. The native called out in a musical language, and the leader of the group came over.

"Still alive?" The young man addressed Santos in Spanish., He had an educated accent, probably from one of the cities, or so it seemed to Santos. The young man knelt down on the litter of leaves and shook his head at Santos' wound. "This one will kill you. We do not have the medicine to fix it, and the nearest clinic is too far away. But we are not barbarians. Unlike your people, we do not leave the wounded to die in the jungle."

Santos tried to protest, but the young man just shook his head. "No. We will not kill you. I think, however, we will teach you a lesson."

The young man called out, his words sounding like birdsong. An old man answered him. The symbols painted on the old man's body and the feathers in his hair reminded Santos of a picture he had seen in a book of a jungle shaman. The two natives conversed for a minute or two, and then the shaman bent over Santos and went to work.

When Santos next woke, he felt stiff and light-headed - as if he slept for days. The young man was sitting beside him. "You are awake. Can you understand me?"

"Yes. I can," Santos croaked. "What have you - ?"

"We have changed you," the young man replied. "Look at your hands, your body."

Santos did as he was told. His hands, his arms, all his flesh was green. Rippling vines ran along his limbs, back to a bolus of blood-red roots that was growing out of his side. Small fibres spread out from this knobbed growth and vanished into the thin soil of the forest.

"Yes," the young man went on. "We have made you part of this forest: bound to it body and soul." He smiled at Santos. "Perhaps you will learn the value of this place."